Archives

Search Points:

Points on Twitter

Month / March 2015

EDITOR’S NOTE: Points is delighted to welcome Chris S. Duvall, an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of New Mexico and the author of Cannabis (University of Chicago, 2015).

Describe your book in terms your bartender could understand.

It’s a world history of the plant genus Cannabis, which is the most widespread crop. The events that enabled cannabis to colonize the world from its evolutionary origins in Central Asia include many of humanity’s most notable migrations. Nowadays, people mostly think of ‘cannabis’ as meaning ‘marijuana’, but the plant has meant many things to many people. It has been bred to produce fiber, oilseeds, and drugs. In the West, cannabis was most valuable historically as the source of hemp, used to make ropes and sailcloth during the Age of Sail. Its value sank to almost nothing by the early 1900s, when sails no longer powered commercial shipping. When Europeans first encountered drug cannabis in Asia and Africa in the 1500s, they saw this as an unfamiliar, wasteful use of a familiar, valuable plant. Unfortunately, this perception resonated with European colonialist views of the world, and cannabis drug use entered negative stereotypes about non-Europeans—even though Europeans have used the drug since they first encountered it. Layered upon these stereotypes was the reality that most cannabis drug users were members of low labor classes. For centuries this use was tolerated, but in the early 1900s, authorities increasingly saw drug cannabis as a problem. Since hemp had lost nearly all value, cannabis drug control laws had minimal economic consequences to 20th-century authorities. The laws that emerged were biased against the poor and people of color, and current drug-law enforcement maintains these biases. The history I tell in the book challenges widespread ideas about the plant’s past, because most cannabis world histories have been light on research and heavy on political advocacy for or against prohibition.

What do you think a bunch of alcohol and drug historians might find particularly interesting about your book?

I think perhaps that it provides an account of the plant’s cosmopolitan distribution based on physical geography, plant biology, linguistics, sociology, pharmacology, science studies, and history. I’m a geographer, so my approach is different from many historians. My strongest influences in writing the book were post-colonial scholars like Judith Carney, Londa Schiebinger, and James Blaut, alongside drugs historians like James Mills, Isaac Campos, and David Courtwright. My past research has focused on understanding people–plant interactions from multiple disciplinary perspectives, not just drug plants in history. I think my interdisciplinary approach helps bring new ideas into the discussions of drug historians.

So what new ideas might the book bring? Three come to mind. First, there has been really important research in plant genetics recently that clarifies the evolutionary history of cannabis. This work shows that there are two cryptic species that people were unable to differentiate except through drug use until the 1960s. Recognizing the genetic basis of psychoactivity and the plant’s evolutionary geography is helpful for understanding why cannabis drug use has often signified cultural difference, not plant diversity, in Western thought. Second, in African Studies several works in the past two decades have shown that societies around the Atlantic bear clear cultural inheritances from Africa, despite past, Eurocentric historiography. I argue that many cannabis drug cultures around the Atlantic are fundamentally African in terms of language and technology (that is, paraphernalia—the bong is a pre-Columbian African invention). This is the topic on which I continue to do research. Third, and really important in considering marijuana’s African past, is the book’s emphasis on social context, not cultural heritage, in determining drug use. African cannabis knowledge is widespread because the plant entered the Atlantic primarily through western Central Africa, and because African-descent peoples have demographically dominated labor underclasses for centuries as a consequence of slavery, colonialism, and racism. Nonetheless, poor, hard laborers from all continents—slaves, sailors, sex workers, low-ranking soldiers, prisoners—have been the drug’s main users for centuries. World histories of cannabis have tended to mask this because they have dwelled upon more charismatic episodes—ancient religious uses in South Asia, 19th-century European pharmacology, and the marijuana boom amongst middle-class people in the Global North since the 1960s.

Like this:

A few months ago, I was packing for my fifth move since 2008. I emptied every closet, box, and drawer. With every move, I’d shed belongings— a full twelve boxes of books in move number four— so why, I wondered, am Istill knee-deep in useless things?

The answer was that, in true academic fashion, I’d redefined “useless.” Turns out “keep,” “store,” and “toss” are unstable categories: I classified our household belongings entirely differently after reading the New York Times article on Marie Kondo, a home organization expert with a devoted global following.

Kondo has a best-selling book and a robustmediapresence, but her most famous piece of advice could be summed up in a tweet: Touch every item you own; if something doesn’t “spark joy,” discard it. I applied this method to my packing process, and a lot of things I’d been storing went out the door. (I also made a few personal archival discoveries— see below).

My “Just Say No” buttons from elementary school. Joy!

The process got me thinking about Americans’ warped relationship with material possessions, an entanglement that has grown more dysfunctional over the past several decades. Even as the middle class flounders, easy credit, cheap foreign labor, and larger home sizes have made it easier than ever for the average American to acquire far more possessions than he needs or can use. Since excessive, compulsive consumption factors into most definitions of addiction, it’s unsurprising that Americans’ increasingly acquisitive habits have led to cultural anxieties about purchasing (and hoarding) behavior.

We’re looking for fresh voices and pieces to add to that list. We’re especially interested in expanding our roster to include bloggers who work on areas outside the US and in fields closely related to the history of alcohol and drugs (e.g. sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, criminology, bioethics, public health, etc.). Interested in adding your perspective? Just email Claire Clark (claireclark@gmail.com) and Emily Dufton (emily.dufton@gmail.com). Introduce yourself and pitch ideas for two pieces you’d like to publish with Points.

Growing up in Florida during President Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs, I became familiar with multiple dope stories, both formal and informal. I followed the news about the Miami drug wars, and I noticed that men and women were involved in drug trafficking.

From living outside the United States for much of my childhood, I learned that women dominate the informal or secondary market. They are street vendors, maids, nannies, and prostitutes; they work off the books. Combined with those observations, women’s and gender history teaches us to ask different questions of the historical evidence. Beginning in the 1990s, I read much of the literature on drug trafficking, and I was struck by the absence of women. Women were rarely mentioned, and they were never identified as partners or bosses. If they were identified, they were lovers, or they were perceived as unreliable in the trade. My starting question was: If women dominate the informal labor market, why aren’t they involved in drug trafficking?

In 1997, I stumbled on the newspaper coverage of Lola la Chata, a Mexico City drug dealer and crime boss who controlled much of the city’s heroin trade, and I noted her longevity and success. I sought other women who were bosses. Guess what? There were many, far more than in my book. I found women bosses in the US, Canada, Mexico and many other parts of the world. They worked with their lovers, husbands, fathers, and sons. Or they built their own criminal networks that employed their children, lovers, or other family members. Until recently, scholars and policing agents either ignored or downplayed the role of women in those partnerships and organizations, which, I think, contributed to women’s career longevity.

What do you think a bunch of alcohol and drug historians might find particularly interesting about your book?

While most scholars acknowledge women in the drug trade, I think many considered them mostly as addicts or low-level workers such as mules. The history of drug trafficking demonstrates that women have parallel experiences to men. Like the majority of men, they are addicts and low-level workers, but they are also dealers, partners, bosses, financiers, and traffickers. Those who rise to the top are exceptional, whether men or women. Women’s historical involvement in the drug trade complicates the metanarratives of crime, vice, and policing, but also women’s and gender history. I think the case studies allow the reader to consider how women intersect to global or local illicit markets, and I think the work leads to other questions that might be pursued by other scholars. For example, what is the role of women in money laundering?

Like this:

Editor’s Note: This week, Bob Beach follows up on an earlier post about the Harry J. Anslinger papers. Today, Bob shares some of his findings from the infamous “gore file.”

In roughly four years, between 1933 to 1937, Harry Anslinger led a policy push to marginalize and strictly regulate the use of marijuana in the United States. His victory, the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, was the culmination of bureaucratic maneuvering, public lobbying, and the use of extreme, sensationalist propaganda. These facts are not in doubt.

But what of propaganda? What is it? Where does it come from? There is no doubt that propaganda can be completely fabricated. But the most effective propaganda is rooted in some form of truth: cultural anxieties, social tensions, economic hardship. Indeed, all three of these were factors during the 1930s and it seemed like each of these elements found their way into the moral panic that was reefer madness. Continue reading →

You probably thought that LSD, Ecstasy and magic mushrooms were first and foremost drugs of abuse. In fact, from the discovery of LSD in the late 1940s until the advent of Tim Leary in the mid-1960s, psychedelics were considered to be a revolution in psychiatry, showing the ability to alleviate or even cure a wide range of chronic, treatment-resistant conditions — from anxiety and depression to drug, alcohol and tobacco addiction, to what would become known as PTSD. They even showed promise in dramatically alleviating garden-variety neuroses and anxieties among otherwise healthy people, as well as in marital and family counseling, and even in dealing with autism. LSD did this not as a part of a long term drug program, but through dramatic, often transcendent experiences while taking the drug from a handful of times to even a single time. Full-blown, life-changing mystical experiences were not uncommon. And though there were some risks — acute attacks of anxiety that, if mismanaged, could lead to hospitalization and rarely psychotic breaks or even suicide attempts — studies of thousands of cases where the drugs were administered in controlled settings by medical professionals demonstrated a remarkable degree of safety and efficacy. All that ended abruptly when psychedelics got caught up in the counter-culture and authorities reacted with a throw the baby out with the bathwater response — effectively shutting down all research for 30 years, while abuse of the drugs continued largely unchecked.

Acid Test uses that oft-forgotten history as background. The foreground is the story of those who struggled against absurd odds to bring this research back to the mainstream of science, succeeding remarkably and now on the verge of the final stage of making these treatments legal once again at a time when half a million US veterans have returned from a decade of war with severe, crippling PTSD, for which the existing treatments are far too likely to fail. This story is told as a completely factual novel, a multi-decade epic, with three major characters: Rick Doblin, the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), who has been fighting government prohibition of psychedelics for more than thirty years; Michael Mithoefer, a former emergency room physician, now a psychiatrist at the forefront of psychedelic therapy research; and his patient Nicholas Blackston, a former Marine who has suffered unfathomable mental anguish from the effects of brutal combat experiences in Iraq. All three men are passionate, relatable people; each flawed, each resilient, and each eccentric, yet very familiar and very human.

Like this:

If not already clear, recent DOJ reports out of Ferguson highlight a broken system of policing and justice rather than a few rogue actors. For many the report was less than revelatory. As one local law professor put it, “it’s like being told that water is wet.” How did we get here? Were there missed opportunities along the way? How do we fix the problem beyond acknowledging a broken system in DOJ reports and in periodic commission reports?

Perhaps part of the solution can be found in commission reports, particularly if we look at change over time. Problems in policing have changed significantly; commission reports in part demonstrate such changes. For example, the NYPD’s 1972 Knapp Commission indicted specific forms of problematic policing. Corruption then was largely a “corruption of accommodation,” police officers giving and taking bribes, buying and selling protection. If anything, cops were turning a blind eye to too much crime on the streets.

Fast forward past two full decades of the modern Drug War. At the tail end of the Crack Era, the NYPD’s Mollen Commission pointed to new sets of problematic police practices. The 1994 report so much as noted in its conclusion: “Today’s corruption is not the corruption of the Knapp Commission days.” Old corruption was, “in its essence, consensual.” The new face of corruption could be characterized by, “brutality, theft, abuse of authority and active police criminality.” Undoubtedly, both forms of corruption were active on the ground in both 1972 and 1994. Nonetheless the shift in emphasis is striking and instructive. Continue reading →